Inputs, Incentives, and Complementarities in Education: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania

Isaac Mbiti, Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero, Youdi Schipper, Constantine Manda and Rakesh Rajani

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019, vol. 134, issue 3, 1627-1673

Abstract: We present results from a large-scale randomized experiment across 350 schools in Tanzania that studied the impact of providing schools with (i) unconditional grants, (ii) teacher incentives based on student performance, and (iii) both of the above. After two years, we find (i) no impact on student test scores from providing school grants, (ii) some evidence of positive effects from teacher incentives, and (iii) significant positive effects from providing both programs. Most important, we find strong evidence of complementarities between the programs, with the effect of joint provision being significantly greater than the sum of the individual effects. Our results suggest that combining spending on school inputs (the default policy) with improved teacher incentives could substantially increase the cost-effectiveness of public spending on education.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (51)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjz010 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Inputs, Incentives, and Complementarities in Education: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:134:y:2019:i:3:p:1627-1673.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().